Stephen K. (havan) reviewed on 11/21/2014 + 138 more book reviews

Roan Mc Kichan is a private detective who's been infected since birth with a virus that makes him periodically transfer into the form of a lion. Unlike may born with this condition he's been able to lead a relatively normal life. Despite being gay and despite being a product of the foster care system Roan even became a police officer for a time, though that didn't work out in the long run.

Roan recently met Paris Lehane, a young man with an even more serious strain of the virus (his causes him to transform into a tiger.) Paris was not born with the virus. He became infected through sexual contact by an irate woman that he slept with. Paris's strain of the virus is acknowledged to be the most severe and the most deadly with many "infected" not living past the first transformation and pretty much all dying at a young age.

Not being a shifter aficionado, my first reaction to this book was "Lions and tigers and no bears, oh my!" But I was quickly able to accept the plot premise and was continually drawn to the parallels with HIV. The author has been criticized by some reviewers for her lack of believability in spots (primarily due to the size of the shifters) but overall I liked her level of detail and even learned of Polycythemia Vera for the first time. (Who knew? A disease where bleeding really IS a useful treatment!)

I first heard about this book because of the plethora of witty chapter headings and they really do add a level of creativity (and snarkieness) to the tale that I found quite enjoyable.

I'm NOT a big fan of private detective fiction but this one was really quite good and I do expect that I'll read more at some time. This one is actually a double helping, with two separate stories in the first volume, and there are eight books so far in the series.

One aside... I know that there are those who are NOT fans of cover art that suggest too strongly how a character should look. And this one does have an image of one character on the cover. However, I was more than half way through this book thinking that I was looking at an image of Paris on the cover but was very surprised to find that the image was intended to be Roan. Also I know that the cat featured isn't of the right species for either of the main characters but that didn't bother me quite so much as realizing how wrong I'd been about the human character pictured.

If you like shifter fiction or if you like detective fiction with an MM bent, you can't do much better than these books. The writing is smart, they adhere to the genre and the characters are likable with just the hint of impending tragedy that will ultimately draw me into reading the next in the series.

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